Abstract:
Earlier this year Aaron Swartz, a US writer and political activist, was arrested and charged with wire fraud, computer fraud and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer. Swartz had entered the MIT campus and used MIT computers to download thousands of scholarly articles. Despite the fact that JSTOR (the owners of the database containing the articles) stated that they had suffered no damage from Swartz’s actions and had asked the US government not to proceed with prosecution, the government went ahead and arrested Swartz. He now faces up to thirty-five years in prison. The charges focus not on the act of accessing and downloading articles per se, but that Swartz had downloaded too many articles at once and that by exceeding the publisher’s license agreement he was engaged in serious hacking. Such zealous pursuit of intellectual property, in spite of the wishes of the ‘aggrieved’ party, indicates the degree to which knowledge capitalism has become an entrenched phenomenon.
Details / PDF:
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